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Saying it aloud made the implications harder to avoid. My mother hadn't simply tucked an old book into a wall because it mattered to her. She had hidden it behind wards and left another location inside it. That required planning. Whatever she'd been trying to protect, she had wanted it hidden from everyone except the person she believed might eventually follow the trail.

Me.

A colder possibility began working its way through me.

"I think she knew she might not be here to tell me herself."

River was quiet for a moment before he lowered himself into a crouch in front of me. He didn't reach for me or tell me I was jumping to conclusions. He simply put himself where I could see him if I needed to.

"That doesn't necessarily mean she knew she was going to die."

"Then why do this?" I turned the book toward him and tapped the note. "Why hide it inside a wall? Why put wards around it? Why leave instructions for a kid who hadn't even been born yet?"

"I don't know."

Neither did I, and that was the problem.

I looked at the message again, forcing myself away from all the questions I couldn't answer and toward the one my mother had apparently intended me to ask.

"What does she mean by the third one?"

"The third flower?"

My gaze went automatically to the pages containing the pressed plants, but that didn't make sense. There were more than three flowers in the book, and nothing about the note suggested I was supposed to count them.

"No. I don't think so."

I rubbed my forehead, trying to remember everything Davon had told us. He'd pulled the old library records because of my mother's lease, and somewhere in that conversation there had been something about…

I stopped.

"The books."

River waited.

"Davon said three books on wildflowers were checked out." I looked down at the title across my lap. "Two were returned. This one wasn't."

Wildflowers of the Ohio Country, Vol. III.

I had been so focused on the flower and my mother's handwriting that I hadn't paid much attention to the Roman numeral on the cover. Now I ran my thumb over it.

Volume Three.

"I assumed this was the third one," I said.

River glanced at the note. "But it can't be."

"No."

Because I was already holding it.

I read my mother's message once more, this time without trying to make it fit the explanation I'd already given it.

The third one is under the stair.

Not the third book.

The third one.